Scientists Figure Out What You See While You’re Dreaming

"A learning algorithm, coupled with brain scans, was able to predict the images seen by dreamers with a 60 percent accuracy." Read more in Smithsonian.

Louboutin’s Nudes Collection Now Includes Flats

An excerpt:

Designers often treat nude like it's a synonym for light tan, thereby excluding women of color. So it's good news that Christian Louboutin has expanded its nudes collection, adding a larger spectrum of skin-tone shades to ensure that no matter what your ethnicity, you can find a shoe to match your complexion.

Read more in NY Magazine.

But then they win

Tracy Chou on internet trolls.

Why Is Artificial Intelligence So Bad At Empathy?

A new study reveals that voice assistant AIs, like Siri and Cortana, might be clever, but they lack fundamental empathy at their core.

Read more in WIRED.

A day in the life of a young black male engineering coding student

This Tweet Storm is worth 2 min of your day.

Dilbert Creator Scott Adams on Donald Trump's "Linguistic Kill Shots"

Is Trump using powerful hypnosis and persuasion techniques hidden to manipulate us all? Read more in Reason.

Thanks, Steve

Women and Minorities Are Penalized for Promoting Diversity

Cringe:

Much to our surprise, we found that engaging in diversity-valuing behaviors did not benefit any of the executives in terms of how their bosses rated their competence or performance. (We collected these ratings from their 360-degree feedback surveys.) Even more striking, we found that women and nonwhite executives who were reported as frequently engaging in these behaviors were rated much worse by their bosses, in terms of competence and performance ratings, than their female and nonwhite counterparts who did not actively promote balance. For all the talk about how important diversity is within organizations, white and male executives aren’t rewarded, career-wise, for engaging in diversity-valuing behavior, and nonwhite and female executives actually get punished for it.

Read more in HBR.

Thanks, NR

Why Do I Have to Call This App ‘Julie’?

Read more in the NYT.

Thanks, +Daniel Romero 

What Is Spacetime, Really?

Read more on Stephen Wolfram's blog.

Thanks, +Fred Ehrsam 

Sleep Technology

Read more in Medium.

Thanks, Rohan

R U There?

A new counselling service harnesses the power of the text message. Read more about Crisis Text Line in the New Yorker.

Artist photoshops men out of political images

See more in Feature Shoot.

Thanks, JK

We’re More Honest With Our Phones Than With Our Doctors

Read more in the NYT.

TED Talk // Casey Gerald: The gospel of doubt

Thanks, +Sharyar Aziz 

Unlucky people with names that break computers.

Haha, sigh. I'm so glad I don't have this problem:

Jennifer Null’s husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. She knew the sort of thing to expect – his family joked about it now and again, after all. And sure enough, right after the wedding, problems began. 

“We moved almost immediately after we got married so it came up practically as soon as I changed my name, buying plane tickets,” she says. When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again.

Read more in BBC.

John Oliver on Encryption

What the first strong AI might be like.

Thanks, +Brian Armstrong 

"Men get funded on potential, and women get funded on progress.”

Cringe. Read more in the WSJ.

The Fed caused 93% of the entire stock market's move since 2008: Analysis

Read more in Yahoo Finance.

Thanks For Ruining Another Game Forever, Computers

Coding Horror looks back on the history of computers beating humans in Chess and then Go.

The 4 Rituals That Will Make You An Expert At Anything

Read more in Barking Up the Wrong Tree.

How Coinbase Ships Product

Check out Brian Armstrong's piece in Medium.

Why Six Hours Of Sleep Is As Bad As None At All

"Getting six hours of sleep a night simply isn't enough for you to be your most productive. In fact, it's just as bad as not sleeping at all." Read more in FastCo.

An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage

Read more about TMS in the NYT.

Your optimized brain: Exploring the frontier of neurostimulation

Read more on tDCS and TMS in Tech Crunch.

Thanks, +Angela Nicholas 

Silicon Valley May Want MBAs More Than Wall Street Does

Never mind the trash talk. More tech companies are hiring MBAs. Read more in Bloomberg.

Thanks, Libby

Hamilton Star Lin-Manuel Miranda rap with Obama at White House

So good. Thanks, Reade

Hillary Clinton's March Madness Picks

Thanks, +Katherine Stiner 

Repeat Roses

One of the most special things I've watched this week. Thanks, Maggie.

TED Talk // Reshma Saujani: Teach girls bravery, not perfection

Thanks, +Michele Choi 

Thoughts on Gender and Radical Candor

An excerpt:

Obnoxious Aggression is what happens when you challenge, but don’t care. Ruinous Empathy is what happens when you care, but don’t challenge — and 80% of management mistakes happen as a result of Ruinous Empathy, in my experience. Finally, worst but also fortunately comparatively rare, is Manipulative Insincerity — when you neither care nor challenge.

Read more at FirstRound.

Thanks, +Megan Gardner 

Most software already has a “golden key” backdoor: the system update

"Software updates are just another term for cryptographic single-points-of-failure." Read more in arstechnica.

Soft Power

How pop star Zayn Malik is rebuilding the modern Muslim man in an age of Islamophobia. Read more in Medium.

Thanks, Tess

What’s with gay men seeking “masculine only” partners?

Read more in Medium.

Thanks, Tess

Elliot Rodger and Poisonous Ideals of Masculinity

"He videotaped misogynistic rants about women before killing himself and at least six others at UCSB. But his hatred of femininity is tangled with hatred of other men—and himself." Read more in the Atlantic.

Speak Peek: Masculinity in Popular Culture

TED Talk // Tony Porter: A call to men

At TEDWomen, Tony Porter makes a call to men everywhere: Don't "act like a man." Telling powerful stories from his own life, he shows how this mentality, drummed into so many men and boys, can lead men to disrespect, mistreat and abuse women and each other. His solution: Break free of the "man box."

She Wanted to Do Her Research. He Wanted to Talk ‘Feelings.’

An excerpt:

Last year, after one of my most talented students left to start her next adventure, she would text me now and then: “This is such a great place,” “I am learning so much here” and “I know this is where I am supposed to be.” 

Then, a month ago, she wrote and asked me what to do. She forwarded an email she had received from a senior colleague that opened, “Can I share something deeply personal with you?” Within the email, he detonates what he described as a “truth bomb”: “All I know is that from the first day I talked to you, there hadn’t been a single day or hour when you weren’t on my mind.” He tells her she is “incredibly attractive” and “adorably dorky.” He reminds her, in detail, of how he has helped her professionally: "I couldn’t believe the things I was compelled to do for you"...  

... Brilliant men make for good copy, even when they fail at their jobs. Recently, reports of sexual harassment and assault within science departments at the University of California, Berkeley, Caltech and the University of Chicago have been in the news. Academia will have to respond. A great chorus of formal condemnation shall be lifted up, and my male colleagues will sputter with gall, appalled by the actions of bad apples so rare they have been encountered by every single woman I know.

Read more in the NYT.

America loves women like Hillary Clinton–as long as they’re not asking for a promotion

A few excerpts:

• If you find this hypothesis unlikely, there’s Ann Friedman’s explanation: Clinton makes people uncomfortable by succeeding too visibly. Clinton is trapped in “the catch-22 of female ambition,” Friedman writes: “To succeed, she needs to be liked, but to be liked, she needs to temper her success.”
• When women do overcome the ambition gap, we punish them for it. One Harvard study found that “when participants saw female politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having less communality (i.e., being unsupportive and uncaring), while this was not true for their perceptions of power-seeking male politicians.” Power-seeking men were seen as strong and competent. Power-seeking women were greeted by both sexes with “moral outrage.”

Read more in Quartz. Thanks, +Melody Wang 

Angry Americans: How the 2008 Crash Fueled a Political Rebellion

Read more in Bloomberg. Thanks, Tom

Do no harm: Some hospitals let a preventable infection kill their patients

Thanks, Ryan

#LetGo

Thanks, +Megan Gardner 

10 Breakthrough Technologies // Conversational Interfaces

This is only the beginning:

Last November, Baidu reached an important landmark with its voice technology, announcing that its Silicon Valley lab had developed a powerful new speech recognition engine called Deep Speech 2. It consists of a very large, or “deep,” neural network that learns to associate sounds with words and phrases as it is fed millions of examples of transcribed speech. Deep Speech 2 can recognize spoken words with stunning accuracy. In fact, the researchers found that it can sometimes transcribe snippets of Mandarin speech more accurately than a person.

Read more in the MIT Technology Review.

Sallie Krawcheck: This Is the Future of Work

"Sallie Krawcheck, once a Wall Street titan and now a serial entrepreneur, has long been an important member of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women community. So it’s fitting that we will kick off each of our six 2016 MPW events with an exclusive piece from Krawcheck. Her first in the series reflects on what she calls her “four careers,” and explains why we should all expect to experience a number of thrilling and unexpected pivots throughout our working lives."

Read more in Fortune.

Thanks, +Melody Wang